Entertainment

Twitter's Evan Williams on the State of Twitter [LIVE]

What does Twitter co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams think of Facebook? Where is its business model going? What is next for one of the web's hottest companies?

Twitter co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams is on taking the stage here at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. We expect him to discuss the state of Twitter, its competition with Facebook, its growing suite of ad products, its new analytics platform and more.

Here are my live notes from his conversation with Federated Media CEO John Battelle:

Live Notes: Evan Williams

All times are in Pacific Standard Time.

4:55 PM: Williams: Our biggest challenge is that there's been way too much demand for of ads. That's why Twitter's ramping up its sales team.

4:57: Williams is discussing Promoted Trends and some of the advertising campaigns brands the company is initiating.

4:58: Twitter's co-founder is discussing "resonance," the algorithm the company uses to figure out whether a promoted tweet or trend stays up based on engagement and other metrics.

4:59: "Twitter's always been big for events." Someone bought a promoted trend for #w2s to target the audience here.

5:00: Battelle: Can you say you have a strong revenue model? Williams: The numbers look good. We're optimistic what it means for our business. We also know we're at the very beginning of this.

5:01: Williams is discussing the partnership it announced today with Gnip surrounding its firehose of data. The people that want the firehose are people looking at trends. The point was never about making money, he says, but about distribution of tweets, which he thinks is a good thing.

5:03: Battelle, regarding the relationship between Facebook and Twitter: "Can we all just get along?" Will we see Twitter's firehose on Facebook? Williams responds that he should've asked Zuckerberg that yesterday, and he's frustrated by the tense relationship between Twitter and Facebook.

5:06: Battelle brings up his move from CEO to product head, as well as New Twitter. "What have you learned from that?"

Williams starts with New Twitter. For a long time, they weren't improving the product he says because they had to focus on scaling. This year, they had the breathing room to build a team to redesign Twitter. Williams wanted to push it further to add new functionality and focus on discovering new content.

Regarding his role change, he said, "This is my fourth role at Twitter." He's changed it based on what Twitter needed.

5:09: Battelle: Was it a difficult decision? Did you have nostalgia? Williams: I had to think hard about stepping down as CEO, but I also had to think hard about taking the role of CEO in the first place.

5:10: Williams: "We have a reputation score with every user." We speculate that if Twitter ever makes those scores public, many social media analytics startups (such as Klout) will suffer as a result.

5:13: Battelle brings up the developer ecosystem question. How can developers know if Twitter will launch something in their vertical? Williams: We've screwed up a lot of that. We didn't set out to be a platform company. We just thought the API would be neat. That's different than a platform though — you need to really think it through. There's often tension between platform providers and developers.

5:14: Twitter is a "Model T" type of product — a very basic service that became wildly popular.

5:15: Williams is discussing how Twitter couldn't be a modern mobile company without its own apps.

5:16: Battelle: "Are photos safe?" Williams: "I don't know." He says photos made the consumption experience better. Twitter wants to create a better photo experience, but the company hasn't determined what that is.

5:18: Investor Chris Dixon recently criticized Twitter for "nuking its ecosystem" by launching products that compete with third party developers. Williams' primary response was that he's not going to make the product worse because developers get angry. He also says he doesn't think Twitter isn't a fully baked platform yet, but aspires it to be one.

5:24: "I've been working on lowering the barrier to publishing for most of my career." He says it's a net positive overall.

5:27: An audience member asks if Twitter is working on other languages. Evan Williams says yes, Twitter will roll out more languages by the end of the year.

5:29: Williams is asked about Hope140 and social good. He speaks about Twitter's Fledgling Wine and the company's philanthropic efforts. Oh, and go buy some of the Twitter wine for the holidays, he says.

5:31: Williams was asked about secondary markets for Twitter's stock. He says they weren't fully prepared for it, not all that happy about it.

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